Half a Crown by Jo Walton Page B

useless shoe over in my hands and thinking again of Cinderella. What prince might find my other shoe and come seeking me? I didn’t think of Sir Alan but of the handsome young man who had sung and incited the riot.
    “Fine,” the streetwalker said. “Ten shillings. Not so much. It’s much worse losing business spending the night in here. You got a fag?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t smoke, sorry.” It always made me cough.
    A woman on the bench along the back wall obliged and handed around cigarettes to most of the women in the room. “If they’d been really worried they’d have taken our smokes,” she said, sharing a light. “I wasn’t expecting no trouble or I wouldn’t have gone along, I just wanted to hear the bands and have a bit of a knees-up. That’s all rallies have been for a long time now. I haven’t been arrested at one since I was courting.” She looked at me. “You never been to one before, have you?”
    “Not since I was a nipper,” I said. “My dad took me to one at Camden Lock once. Since then, no, but my boyfriend wanted me to come along with him tonight and it seemed like it would be a bit of fun.”
    “Thought I hadn’t seen you before,” she said, clearly satisfied.
    Just as I was congratulating myself on how easily I had blended in with these women, the motherly one sitting next to me noticed my skirt. It wasn’t true you could go anywhere in tweeds; Paddington Nick was obviously too rough for them. I had kept my coat buttoned so that they wouldn’t see my silk shirt and cashmere sweater,but I couldn’t help my skirt showing. Part of it was muddy where it had been trodden on. The woman reached out and rubbed the cloth between her finger and thumb. “Nice bit of stuff you’ve got there,” she said. “Where’d you get that?”
    “Second-hand stall at Camden Lock Market,” I lied. “Hardly worn at all. It’s my best skirt, my mum will skin me for getting mud on it.”
    She gave me a shrewd look as if she was summing up my hair, bedraggled as it was, and my raincoat, and not quite believing me. It was a relief when a policeman came to the bars and called out two names. The streetwalkers answered. “Letting you two go, this time,” the policeman said.
    “That’s a relief,” said a woman in turquoise, as soon as they had gone. “I didn’t like being in the room with them in case I caught a disease.”
    Everyone else laughed, including the suspicious woman next to me. After a while, she offered me a barley sugar from a packet in her pocket, which I took gratefully. I was terribly hungry, and it was quite clear nobody was about to feed us. The sugar, or something, maybe just sucking the sweet, which I hadn’t done for ages, made me feel a bit better. Dad used to like barley sugar. He’d buy two ounces in a twist of paper from one of the huge jars in the sweetshop. They were golden like sunlight and terribly inclined to stick together. I don’t think I’d had one since he died.
    It was very cold in the room, so nobody questioned my keeping my coat buttoned. I chanced a look at my watch after a while, when nobody seemed to be paying any attention to me. Ten o’clock. I should have been in the Blue Nile by now—a real nightclub. Mrs. Maynard usually wouldn’t let us go near them. If Betsy and Sir Alan had got away, he wouldn’t have taken her to a nightclub, not without me. They’d have gone home. Mrs. Maynard would be terribly worried about me. I wondered what she’d do. She’d probably wait abit in case I turned up, but after awhile she’d be sure to contact Uncle Carmichael, in which case I might be taken out of here at any moment. I tried counting time and working out how long it would take for Betsy and Sir Alan to get home, and then for Mrs. Maynard to decide to get in touch with Uncle Carmichael, and then for him to find out I was here and come to get me. At least another hour, I thought.
    I didn’t want to ask for him, to say I was his niece, which